Around 5 pm on a Thursday in December 2022, a programmer focused on privacy and freedom of information named Micah Lee learned, to his surprise, that he had just been banned from Twitter. His crime: posting a link to @Elonjets, an account on competing social media service Mastodon that tracked the location of Twitter’s new billionaire owner Elon Musk’s private jet, a link Musk would later claim amounted to “doxing” Although the jet’s location information is publicly available.
For a moment, Lee mourned the loss of an account he had worked on for years and that had more than 50,000 followers. Then, almost immediately, that feeling was replaced by relief at having escaped a platform that, in his opinion, was already in precipitous moral decline. Since Musk took over two months earlier, Twitter’s new owner had already allowed previously banned far-right and even neo-Nazi figures to return to the service in the name of free speech, while also deleting the accounts of leftists. Perhaps being banned for offending the mercurial tycoon behind those partisan decisions was “a good way to go,” Lee decided.
He hasn’t looked back. Twitter eventually told Lee that he could return to the service if he deleted his @Elonjets tweet. Instead, he stayed off the platform for eight months before finally deleting that post, but only so he could log in and delete his entire history on the platform. A few months later, when Twitter had become X, he wrote some messages promoting a book he had written—now all removed too—and says he has barely touched the service otherwise. “Honestly, my mental health has improved a lot since then,” he adds.
Now, Lee wants to help you achieve that same cleansing release. Today, the launched cyd—acronym for “Claw back Your Data”—a desktop application designed to give users more control over their X history: archive it, trim it to their preferences, or destroy it completely. In the free version of Cyd, the program allows anyone to download your X publications; Cyd can save up to 2000 of your most recent posts, or you can use X’s built-in feature that allows you to download your entire archive and then automatically delete them. For $36 a year, users can access Cyd’s premium features, such as clearing their account content with more granular filters based on variables like date, number of likes or retweets, or keywords, stop retweeting or remove likes from posts en masse. and unfollow all X users.
While Cyd for now is designed specifically for managing (or emptying) your X account, Lee says he hopes to eventually add other features to perform the same archiving and deletion functions on services like Facebook and Reddit. “A handful of billionaires like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos control all the platforms that we use all the time and where we have all our data,” Lee says. “Basically, I want to make the users of these platforms (everyone else who isn’t one of these really rich tech billionaires) a little more empowered.”